How to Create an Elegant Slideshow in Aperture

Share your photos with friends and family using Aperture’s slideshow tools

Aperture takes care of your photos from the moment you import them to the time they’re ready to be shown to your friends, family or clients. The sharing aspect is actually quite a big part of this program and you have a lot of options available to you depending on what you’re looking for.

If it’s a simple matter of sending a handful of shots, you can use email by selecting the photos in question and clicking on the appropriate button in the toolbar. An email message will be automatically created for you and you’ll even be able to choose the resolution of your pictures. But this is just for starters: you can also send your photos to your Facebook or Flickr account, or even your Photostream if you have an iCloud account. But these options can feel a little bare.

A slideshow may be the best way to present your photographs.

A more elegant and elaborate solution would be to create books in a manner similar to what you can achieve with iPhoto, although you’re given many more options to play with in Aperture. Unfortunately, the drawback here is that it can take days for those books to be printed and sent to you or your recipient.

So if you’re looking for something more immediate but also more interesting than simply sharing individual photos, you should consider making a slideshow. The process is incredibly simple: you can choose to automate it by selecting a theme, which looks beautiful but offers little to no customization; or you can go for a basic style that you can tweak to your heart’s content.

We’ll show you various options in this tutorial. Once your slideshow looks as good as it can, click the Export button, top-right of the interface. Select the device you’d like to render it for (be it for an iPhone, iPad, HDTV or a custom size) and you’re good to go.

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Present Your Photos in a Slideshow

To create a slideshow, start by selecting a few shots from one of your projects. You can click on the first image and control-click on another to select them and all those in between, or command-click instead to only choose the photographs you click on. Then go to File > New > Slideshow.

A drop-down sheet appears offering a choice of 14 themes for you to work with. Click one to get a preview with your first few chosen shots as examples. For the purposes of this exercise, select "Photo Mobile", give your slideshow a name and click Choose theme.

Your pictures appear at the bottom with the main section dedicated to a preview of your currently selected image. Move your cursor over the thumbnails to see the slideshow animation. Add more shots by dragging them from projects onto the slideshow’s name in the sidebar.

Your new shots will appear at the end of the list of thumbnails but you can easily reorder them by dragging them left or right. To the right of the preview section are your options, which are meager. To see more choices, click the Themes button, top-left of the preview section.

You’re presented with the same Theme drop-down sheet. Choose "Classic" this time to transform your entire slideshow. Notice that the sidebar now offers you far more in the way of parameters, such as being able to choose a transition between images.

Select the Ken Burns option then click the Edit button to its right. Your image will now have two rectangles over it: the green one is your start point, the red one is the end. You can resize each and reposition them on the photo. Click Done to set your changes.

Click the musical note, lower-right of the preview section, to reveal the audio browser. Search for a soundtrack for the slideshow, from either iTunes or GarageBand. Drag the track over your thumbnails. Once the background turns green, release the mouse button.

Choose Fit Selected Slide to Main Audio Track from the cogwheel icon, lower-left of the Preview section, to do just that. Alternatively, click the button to the cogwheel’s right. This allows you to manually set when the slideshow moves to the next slide.

The "Classic" and "Ken Burns" themes let you add titles to photos (from the Selected Slides tab). If you’d rather create a blank slide in order to show text, do this from the cogwheel button shown in Step 8. Text options for other themes are more limited.